Shedding Light
by applestoalways47
Summary: A new, non-canon twist on Patrick's breakdown being revealed, one that examines both the Turners' pasts and how they reveal them to each other. Started this before 3x07 and never finished it. Hope you enjoy.
1. Chapter 1

**Friends, Nonnatuns, countrywomen, lend me your ears! Just kidding, lend me your eyes to read this little piece of mine. That was a horrible joke, but whatever, y'all won't judge me. I found the first few pages of this fic, unfinished, in my notebook from way back when we were unsure of what 3x07 and the adoption interview would entail, which invited much speculation of course. I thought I'd finish it now to celebrate my newly minted adulthood, though it won't be canon, so I hope you like it. Love you all.**

Chapter 1

_I can't live with this between us, Patrick!_

She took a moment to recover herself, a million thoughts and words flying in and out of the transom of her mind.

Then she ran after him.

He was not hard to find.

His muffled sobs echoed off the walls of a home wrought with newfound emptiness. Every stuttered breath sent a shard of pain through Shelagh's heart as she stood in the living room doorway, her husband weeping uncontrollably into his hands.

Those hands—those tender, strong hands that delivered new life, that healed any and every wound, that memorized every line and curve of her body nearly every night. Her heart ached with love and compassion for this beautiful mess of a man.

But she had to be firm.

She had trusted him with her heart, her body, her present and future—but he had not trusted her with his past. But then again, how much of her life had she revealed to him? She shook herself, and her resolve returned.

"You can't keep running from this, Patrick," she began, her voice low and quivering, struggling to hold back the comfort she longed to give him.

"I've run from it until now," he replied, his face still in his hands. He felt as though looking at her would simply open the floodgates anew.

"Why?"

Such a small word, such a vast question.

"Shelagh…I can't. You don't know…you can't…you shouldn't—"

"Oh for God's sake, Patrick! Can you for once treat me like a woman and not a child?"

He looked up at her then, the pity that had filled her eyes now evaporated by the flames of anger.

"Don't think you can protect me," she continued, walking toward him with her fists clenched at her sides, "or that you need to. I started nursing even before I joined the Order, so don't think I didn't see my fair share of men broken by war."

"You weren't at the front, Shelagh," he growled as he stood, his own rage flaring. "You didn't have to pull out a bullet you'd just seen enter a man's body a minute before! You didn't have to dress the gaping wound of a soldier who could see the arm he'd just lost still lying on the ground as he howled in agony! You didn't—"

"No! I didn't!" she screamed, just to make him stop, just to keep herself from throwing her arms around him and holding him to her until all the demons of his past ceased to haunt his soul.

A palpable silence hung in the air, perforated only by their heaving breaths.

"What I did do," she went on shakily, "was watch helplessly as those injured men thought they were getting better…only to have their families come in, day after day, to watch them die. Some of them were little more than boys. I was barely 18 myself."

Her eyes closed with the weight of her confession, long-repressed, painful memories flooding her and causing her to barely register Patrick's resigned slump onto the sofa. His heavy sigh brought her back to the present, and she opened her eyes to see him as she'd first found him, his head in his hands.

She knelt before him, her hands on his knees, her eyes searching in vain for his.

"I treated people with war neurosis, Patrick. My night shifts were spent trying to give sedatives to screaming patients trapped within their nightmares. Of all people—and as your wife—" Her breath caught. "I would have understood."

"But I didn't want you to," he protested as his head rose, his face and hands stained afresh with tears, this time brought on by the knowledge of what she had suffered in a time when he couldn't shield her from the cruelty of the world. "This was supposed to be a new start for both of us, Shelagh—a road to a bright future. I couldn't dare risk darkening it with the horrors of my past."

He paused as a thought seemed to sink in.

"But now I've blackened all our hopes by hiding them. We may never have a child of our own because I was selfish and afraid."

He moved to place his head back into the cradle of his hands, but her fingers threaded through his first.

"Patrick," Shelagh began as steadily as she could, "I've been afraid, too, and not all hope is lost yet. Even if it were, I could…"

She swallowed hard.

"I could bear not having a child."

His eyes lifted to bore into hers.

"It would nearly kill me, but I could bear it. With you and Timothy at my side, I could. But losing you…losing you would make my life mean nothing. I left everything behind for you, and for Timothy, and you helped me come alive in the world again. You claimed my heart and my body as yours and guided me in doing the same for you, so if anything—pain, distrust, fear—were to take you from me, only my aching soul would be left to pine for you. So don't shut me out, Patrick. Please."

Her last word escaped on a whisper as she brought their woven hands together, as if in prayer.

"Oh, my love," he sighed, pressing his forehead to hers and feathering kisses on her delicate fingers between his calloused ones. He leaned forward to capture her lips, his kiss becoming more fervent, more feverish, with every swipe of his tongue against hers, every sigh she breathed into his mouth.

He helped her to rise, backing her toward the stairs, which they stumbled up while trying to keep their bodies and lips connected.

They reached their bed, tumbling onto it as they forgot everything—past, present, future, and time itself. Life became light, the darkness fading, if only for a little while, their bodies arcing like the crescent moon that softens the blackness of night.

**Cheesiness overload complete. Chapter 2 coming soon. Read and review please :)**


	2. Chapter 2

**Thank you to the kind souls who reviewed! Here's a bit of a long one. Enjoy!**

**A/N: Little note, in a previous fic I used "Helen" as Patrick's first wife's name, but since "Margaret" seems to be the headcanon that's generally accepted, I decided to use that. Credit wherever it's due, and thanks.**

Chapter 2

"I want to give you everything," he breathed, his body curled and woven with hers, "to share everything in my life with you. I suppose I must share my past."

"Patrick, darling, you don't have—"

His lips brushed softly against hers, enough to be tender and enough to interrupt.

"I want to, Shelagh. It's something I've kept hidden for far too long, and you deserve to know."

She pressed another kiss to his lips, a prayer for courage and a reassurance of a listening ear. Her crystalline eyes met his as her thumb moved in slow circles on the curve of his jaw. He warmed at the knowledge of his current blessings, lessening the icy grip on his heart that had locked the pain of the past inside, lining the valves and arteries so that at times it felt as though the knot of cardiac muscle shuddered rather than beat.

But as she looked at him, the love she radiated gently thawed the frozen shell, allowing words to slowly trickle out.

"I was 28 years old when we heard Chamberlain's crackling voice on the radio," he began, his eyes leaving hers to focus pensively on his fingers as they played with the stray locks of hair on her bare shoulder.

"We were at war with Germany. I remember writing up a report for one of my biology courses—I was nearly in my last term of med school, which I'd had to put off for a few years to get the money—and there it was. War."

He let out a deep sigh, and Shelagh's thumb continued its soothing circles.

"I remember feeling so exempt from it at first, like it had nothing to do with me. I was studying to become a doctor, and nothing, not even war, could get in the way of that. But then my mother started crying—"

He could still see her face, buried in hands covered in baking flour, a wooden spoon abandoned in batter as the news shook her shoulders and the nation with a single sentence.

"My father just sat in the armchair next to the wireless, his eyes seemingly lost in memories. He had fought in the Great War, and it had cost him his right leg from the knee down. Taking care of him, along with lack of funds, was why I still lived with my parents, but he was also the reason I became a doctor. I thought, what if I could save the next man's leg?"

"So when Alec had his accident…" she murmured, realization dawning.

He nodded, absently meeting her eyes for a fleeting moment, then shifting his gaze back to the twirled strands of gold between his fingers.

"Yes, that's why I took it so hard."

She laid a kiss on his temple, a silent granting of permission; continue or desist.

"I took my books upstairs and finished the paper as though nothing had happened, as though I hadn't heard the words. I walked into class the next morning, and instead of my professor at the podium, there was a man in uniform.

"'Join in the war effort, lads,' he said to us. 'You'll get practical experience in the field and serve your country at the same time.'

"And then suddenly the war began to matter. I thought, here's my opportunity to give those soldiers the chance my father never got. So I went straight from the lecture hall to my fiancé's door, kissed her and promised to write, kept walking until I reached the local Draft Board, and enlisted in the Medical Corps."

His eyes took on a dreamy quality then, and Shelagh slid her hand from his jaw into his hair, reminding him of his anchor.

He placed a kiss of gratitude where her neck met her shoulder, sighing again as he prepared to go on. She could not stop the involuntary shudder, the sharp intake of breath, as the air blew across the place his lips had just been. A small smile quirked the corners of his mouth, only lasting for a moment. He had to be strong for her.

"I don't remember having any fear at the beginning. I felt camaraderie with my fellow men, pride in my mission, a burning desire to prove myself as a good doctor. I had found the adventure I didn't know I'd been looking for. I was shipped out to France in early 1940."

He paused, closing his eyes briefly, swallowing down his shame at his naïveté.

"I wasn't stationed at the front right away. We set up a makeshift hospital near Lille, receiving the wounded and stabilizing those we could before sending them across the Channel to the London. I took my revulsion and harnessed it, using it to learn more quickly, to listen to and follow my superiors' every order, telling myself I was becoming a better physician for it. I spent three years there, and I felt I had found my true purpose."

His pause was longer this time, his sigh more ragged.

"Then in 1943, Occupied France kept expanding. The Allies were taking a beating, and more doctors were needed at the front. I was one of the first to volunteer, eager for another new adventure."

Then he broke.

"God, Shelagh, I was so naïve," he breathed, burying his face between her breasts. She held him there, feeling his tears seep into her skin as his hands clutched her back, her fingers weaving through his hair. She feathered kisses along his forehead, feeling his heart rate slow against the curve of her waist. His grip on her loosened, but his head remained on her chest. He gently kissed her sternum, seeking strength, but kept his eyes closed.

"I thought I had seen every possible wound, every way a body could contort with pain. I thought I could handle it. I was so wrong. So wrong, Shelagh."

He swallowed thickly.

"Putting my life on the line was what brought the fear. The artillery shells, as constant as rain; the gunfire popping against my eardrums; the blood and sweat that seemed to cover everything like a fine mist. The trenches were where I lost God, among other things."

Shelagh's breath caught.

He laid another kiss between her breasts by way of an apology.

"I fought the fear, though, for a year or two. I got to know the unit I was caring for; heard their stories and told them mine. It was a brief respite from the enemy that lay beyond."

He prepared himself for the long-buried pain that would come with his next words.

"There was a man—a boy, really—who I became quite close to. He was a student as well—19, maybe 20, studying to be an entomologist. We shared our coffee and our rations, our dreams and our fears. Then one day, he got caught on the wrong side of a shell. He had tripped over someone's old magazine, left in the dirt. He had just been two steps behind me a minute before…"

He burrowed infinitesimally further into his wife's chest, breathing in the warmth and life of her skin.

"His name was Timothy."

Then his tears returned perforce and he let them fall, his sobs wracking both of their bodies as they clung to each other.

"Oh, Patrick," she sighed into his hair as her own eyes filled, rubbing softly up and down his back.

His weeping and her soothing continued, the sweet nothings she whispered gradually calming him.

"It was then that the horrors started," he resumed unevenly. "The nightmares were too vivid, too clear and painful. I saw his face distinctly in every one of them. I screamed half the night and laid awake for the rest of it, so I had no energy to heal anymore. I blamed myself for Timothy's death, so how could I be responsible for my men's lives? My superior reported my behavior, and I was sent to Northfield until peace came."

He breathed a whoosh of air onto her collarbone, feeling as though a weight had suddenly been lifted, but some pain still lingered.

"My Margaret had waited all that time for me, so I could hardly burden here with what I had seen and done. I wouldn't have been right, I thought. Her father had been Timothy as well, so that's what we chose for our boy, but only I knew the true reason for my son's name. We were happy enough then, my memories being repressed more and more each day. But one afternoon in the park, my three-year-old began chasing a butterfly, and I sat on the ground and wept."

Another pause, another sigh.

"Margaret asked what was troubling me, but even years later, I couldn't bring myself to tell her, to relive that experience. Sometimes I still find myself back in that dirt. Even now…"

"Shh, shh," she whispered softly, holding him, letting him know she was there and that no words were needed.

"Thank you."

His lips touched the inside curve of her left breast, and she knew all was lost.

His kisses climbed higher, to her neck, to her mouth, as his hands began to wander.

"I need to feel you," he murmured. "I need to know you're here."

"I am here," she breathed breathlessly. "I'll never leave you."

"I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you."

His breath wrote the words into her skin, their repetition increasing, not lessening, their meaning. His questing lips and hands moved everywhere, mapping and marking her, each kiss and touch one of gratitude for hearing his story, for granting him life anew. He lost himself in her scent, her sound, her feel, as those of the battlefield slowly faded away.


End file.
